A quick glimpse in my life of fostering the growth of my family

Planning Meals for the Week

My husband recently commented about how much money we have been spending on food lately, and how we’ve been eating too much junk…then came home with a dozen doughnuts! Hah! He’s right, as you can tell by this example. It’s been getting a little crazy because I’m just not having the opportunity to cook in the evenings. And for some reason I stopped planning ahead, which I think had a lot to do with food boredom. And basically, let’s face it, without a plan, meals fall apart. And so does a budget.

I’m generally very happy with what and how our children eat. In preparing for this post I took some time and really noticed how they are eating. In the last couple days I have watched them happily chow down on cooked purple cabbage, red peppers, raw and steamed broccoli, raw sugar snap peas, raw carrots, salads, and other vegetables. Not to mention their voracious appetite for fruit. We ran out of fresh fruit in our house for three days last week. I can’t remember the last time this happened. When I got home one evening Petra ran up to me and said can you please go to the store and buy some apples and pears. The next day while at Lowes with dad, she asked if they also sold apples and pears. Her daily routine includes an apple every day after lunch. I wish I could say I did so well. And it’s so nice because she doesn’t want it cut or peeled – you just hand her the whole thing.

But back out topic. I needed a plan for the week.

Our evenings are always busy. I’m lucky if I make it home before 8 pm this time of year, and we have church and gymnastics during the week. So there are a lot of days when we just don’t have time. So here are some of the facts going into this issue:

1) I have no time in the evening to put together a meal;

2) I need quick, quick;

3) I need some things already prepared so if I don’t make it home from work Thomas can pull something out for the family;

4) I want to avoid processed and boxed foods;

5) I want to stick to paleo foods (no dairy, no grains);

6) I need easy packed lunches for three of us; and

7) I also have to get 5 of us fed with healthy breakfasts before 7:30 am each morning.

So I started making a plan; hopefully a timesaving plan for our meals. A plan that Thomas can pull together if I’m not home in the evenings without too much work. It is slowly beginning to take shape.

To add to our food issues, our teen foster daughter has a completely different idea of what she wants to eat. This is very normal. She comes from a completely different background and family – with entirely different eating habits. She is used to different meals, and loves eating junk and fast food. Add to it that she is pregnant and certain foods make her sick and nauseous and you have a real interesting food dilemma in our house. Choosing foods that are healthy and that she likes is a big challenge.

Here are some of the steps I am taking.

We have salad usually everyday for lunch. I usually try to make them in the morning. This week I decided to make a very big salad on Sunday evening that we can use the rest of the week. I chopped nuts on the side and stored them separately. And I didn’t add tomatoes to the salad because they always get things soggy.

I’ve slowly discovered over the last two months that we do best during the week if Thomas grills a lot of our meat on Sunday. I can use this meat throughout the week for our lunches, to make quick chicken salad, to use for our dinners when in a rush.

I had our teen go through a list of pregnancy menu ideas and write down anything that she thought she would eat. This gave me a much more expansive list that I can work with. Everything certainly wasn’t paleo, but it was better than junk food. Her lunch box looked a lot more nutritious today than in day’s past.

But I needed more help, more ways to plan ahead. So I opened up Google and went to work. I wanted to stick to a paleo menu as much as possible (I’ll have to work out later how to get more raw in there as well) and did a quick search. I came up with some good results.

I was thrilled to see a recent blog entry on Robb Wolf’s website, one of the leading experts on Paleolithic nutrition. One of the first ideas on this blog post was to grill your meat at the beginning of each week, not quite cooking it all the way so that when you have to reheat it for the next meal it won’t be hard and dry.

And on that blog is a link to an amazing one week menu (breakfast, lunch and dinner) with foods, recipes, and even a grocery list to show you how to do it.

My real struggle it appears is going to be with the vegetables. I am not interested in nuking my veggies in plastic. So I’m going to have to work on seeing what freezes well.

So here is a complete list of things we are going to start trying to do over the weekend for our busy week preparations:

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3 thoughts on “Planning Meals for the Week”

Hey Sher! It’s awesome to see that you are determined to provide healthy paleo meals for your family even in the midst of a busy work schedule and on top of having a very prego daughter at home. I commend you my friend! Eating paleo is so much easier here in Africa since the majority of grocery stores are void of processed foods and you have to be creative. It’s forcing us to eat more paleo and I welcome the challenge. We are still learning how to prepare and plan meals here. Love you and miss you!!!

Without clipping coupons, I don’t know how I could survive. Some people have been able to get so good at it, I hear that they walk out of the store with 4 big bags of groceries for less than $5.00. No kidding. We have seen it happen.

Oh, I LOVE coupons!! I just wish I could find more to use. There were months and months where I saved tons of money. But now we pretty much only eat produce and meat, and its really hard to find coupons for those. So I end up looking more for sales.